Haiti After Moïse: ‘The King Is Dead, Long Live the King!’

The campaign to make Jovenal Moïse a national hero of Haiti is in full swing. That is the significance of the astonishing funeral accorded on Friday to the president who was gunned down in his own home as he was maneuvering to hang onto office despite the expiration of his constitutional mandate.It is hard to recall a funeral of a chef d’etat anywhere that heard the widow of the martyred president address her husband as if he were alive and declare, as Martine Moïse did to the assembled throngs: “The assassins are here, looking at us, listening to us. We’ll look them right in the eyes and tell them, ‘Enough is enough!’”The funeral, held in Haiti’s second city of Cap-Haitian, was a family affair. No high official — of the government or the Catholic church— spoke. The funeral took no state funds. Moïse’s son, Jorvelain, called his father “a man full of love surrounded by wicked people, an honest man who lived among traitors, a hero.”Since the family accepted no funds from the government, what has happened to the 350 million gourdes, equivalent to $3.8 million, that the interim premier, Claude Joseph, said had been earmarked for the rites. A transparent report on expenditures is among the first tasks for new Prime Minister Ariel Henry, a physician.Some of this money has no doubt gone into the campaign to embalm Jovenel Moïse as Haiti’s modern hero. Videos and articles on social media, at home and abroad, are now extolling the late president as on a par with such heroes of Haiti’s independence as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines.Such is an opinion piece issued last week in the Herald, in Miami, by Damian Merlo, a lobbyist whose firm is reportedly paid $25,000 monthly by the Haitian government. He writes that “Jovenel was a kind man, a gentle man, who cared about his people, and his untimely death needs to mean something. He wanted what is best for Haiti, a new constitution, elections, prosperity.”Understandably, Mr. Merlo couldn’t be expected to say otherwise. He was the foreign expert who designed the campaign that propelled Michel Martelly, the vaudeville singer known as “Sweet Micky,” to Haiti’s presidency. It was his friend Mr. Martelly who, at Miami in 2015, introduced him to Jovenel Moïse.Though there was a fallout between Mr. Martelly and Moïse, the former issued last week a video in which, six times in six minutes, he begs for Moïse, “mon president,” to forgive him. He unearthed a campaign video of 2016, when he was shoulder to shoulder with the candidate, saying he’s the one who got him in the race.Yet Mr. Martelly failed to attend the funeral, putting out a tweet in saying, “out of wisdom and personal convenience, I give up on my duty to accompany you in dignity to your last abode.” Mr. Martelly was warned publicly not to set foot in Cap-Haitian.Five other living presidents also failed to show up. Nor did any foreign head of state of CARICOM, the region’s political alliance. Not even President Abinader of the Dominican Republic hopped over the border to pay his last respects to the president with whom he had met two months earlier and had announced some projects.The sad fact is that under Moïse, Haiti’s democratic institutions have become dysfunctional. He held not even one election, not even for dog catcher. So parliament is non-existent. Only 10 senators, from a total of 30, are in service, devoid of quorum for any official action.A judiciary that might be a check and balance is instead beholden to the president who, defying the constitution, went as far as firing three Supreme Court judges. Since the murder of the president, Haiti’s Superior Court of Accounts had scheduled a hearing Monday on a complaint filed by Justice Coq, challenging the president’s action.Yet the prosecutor at the main court in Port-au-Prince issued an arrest warrant during the weekend for Judge Coq, alleging participation in the assassination plot against the president. A caravan of 16 police vehicles arrived, Monday, at the judge’s residence only to find her gone, apparently to a more secure place.Insecurity is such that even the American delegation to the president’s funeral decided to cut short its stay. That was after gunshots were heard and the smell of tear gas flowed in the direction of the big tent where the ceremonies were being held. The delegates, headed by America’s envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, took off in a hurry. Madam Moïse flew to Miami from Haiti this morning with her children and bodyguards.Though democratic institutions have been dismantled in Haiti during the decade of rule by the party known as PHTK, the international community, through the CORE Group of Western diplomats in Port-au-Prince, imposed Prime Minister Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon who was named to his post by Jovenel Moïse only two days before his assassination.It is time for the international community to listen to those voices in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora calling for an independent interim government not beholden to the PHTK. Perhaps Ambassador Danel Foote, named last Thursday, Special Envoy for Haiti by the Biden administration, will be able to succeed where western diplomats have failed. They’ll need to move with dispatch. Otherwise the word from Haiti is “The king is dead — Long live the king!”________Ambassador Joseph, former envoy of Haiti in Washington, is a contributing editor of The New York Sun and proprietor of Haiti Observateur.

Haiti After Moïse: ‘The King Is Dead, Long Live the King!’

Haiti After Moïse: ‘The King Is Dead, Long Live the King!’

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